Affiliate Content Is Bringing Brand and Performance Marketing Together

Content’s role in affiliate marketing has been growing at a rapid clip in recent years. In 2019, content accounted for 40% of affiliate traffic—by 2020, content’s share of traffic had grown to 50%, and in 2021, it was reported content drove 65% of traffic. By our own estimation, content-driven affiliate traffic continues to grow much faster than traffic from other categories of affiliates such as coupon and loyalty partners. For example, while content-driven traffic grew 14% from 2020 to 2021, coupon traffic dropped 16%, and loyalty reversed its upward tick and declined 6%, following a rise in the year prior. But what’s most significant about the evolution of affiliate content marketing is that it is bringing together the best of brand and performance marketing, providing marketers a way to communicate powerful emotional messages while driving conversions and measuring traffic. Let’s dive further into the divide between brand and performance marketing, how affiliate content bridges the gap and how marketers can capitalize on the channel. Affiliate Marketing Is a Safe Haven for Publishers in a Cookieless Future Brand versus performance marketing Brand marketing typically refers to the upper-funnel campaigns that build awareness and possibly consideration. Brand marketing channels include display, TV, PR and print, where marketers place content that can tell powerful and complex stories but without the benefits of direct response and attribution. By contrast, performance marketing is a mid- to lower-funnel approach that typically aims to reach qualified audiences and convert them into customers. Channels include social, search, partnership marketing and email. Performance marketing has the advantage of triggering quantifiable responses, both leading to valuable business outcomes like increased revenue and allowing marketers to evaluate the success of their efforts. In recent years, the transformation of all marketing to digital has pushed many marketers toward performance channels such as social and search. Manned by tech giants like Facebook and Google, these channels are familiar to many marketers, and their quantifiable metrics soothe the CFO or CRO who can be confident that marketing spend is producing justifiable returns. Traditionally, marketers intent on providing return on ad spend risked marginalizing the deeper relationships that content and other brand marketing can forge with customers in favor of measurable clicks. But affiliate content is calling that divide into question and should lead marketers to reconsider whether there really is a trade-off between branding and performance. Collapsing the divide Old-school linear TV is a perfect example of traditional content-driven brand marketing. A marketer might place a 30-second ad against a program with millions of viewers. The ad comes with narrative building and emotional potential that search and social ads, scrolled by on mobile, can hardly match. But its effects are hard to measure, and the audiences it reaches are not targeted. Affiliate content is resolving the shortcomings of such brand marketing efforts, combining its creative advantages with the measurability of performance marketing. Consider, for example, a brand that partners with a publisher on that same 30-second ad formerly limited to linear TV. Whether on CTV or the open web, the brand’s marketing partners can present the ad to target audiences by connecting device data to IDs and measure performance by tying device IDs to traffic or transaction information. The upshot is that the border between brand and performance marketing is dissolving. It is no longer the case that marketers need to sacrifice powerful branding for measurable clicks, or the latter for the former. With affiliate content, marketers can get both. Optimizing affiliate content partnerships What makes affiliate content more powerful than content marketing on a brand’s owned channels is that it provides access to a broader audience, and it can often be created in a way that melds with the publisher’s content, crafting a seamless and organic feel. This allows brands to extend their reach, determine who they’re reaching and communicate with diverse audiences in ways to which those prospective customers, partners or investors are accustomed. The catch with affiliate content is that as marketers reap the benefits of partnerships, managing them becomes its own task. Discovering and recruiting partners, optimizing the affiliate mix, ensuring brand safety and organizing payments can be tedious and time-consuming. With the right tools, marketers can reap the benefits of affiliate content without the logistical hiccups and enjoy the benefits of performance marketing along with the power of brand-building content. Brands See Increased Sales After Arming Creators on Social With Affiliate Links